Changing of the Guard
|
First-year goalie Allison Spencer (12), a two-time Ivy League Rookie of the Week in 2013, will be one of the key returning players when Tracey Bartholomew takes over as head coach.

Former LIU Brooklyn women’s soccer head coach Tracey Bartholomew will be taking over as head coach of the Light Blue women’s soccer team, Athletics Director M. Dianne Murphy announced earlier today.

Bartholomew, the 2008 NEC Coach of the Year, will be taking over the spot left vacant by the departure of Kevin McCarthy, CC ’85, who resigned in November after 20 years at the helm of the program. She was most recently head coach at LIU Brooklyn from 2000 to 2013, where her teams experienced a good deal of success.

The Blackbirds made three NCAA tournament appearances under Bartholomew (2006, 2011, and 2012) and set a program record for wins in 2010 with 15. She also won three NEC regular season titles (2006, 2008, and 2010) while at LIU. Prior to taking over as the Blackbirds’ head coach, Bartholomew played on four NCAA tournament teams at the University of Rochester and was an assistant coach at Colgate, where her teams made four tournament appearances in five years.

“Her experience developing young women into successful soccer players and high-achieving students is exactly what we were looking for throughout our coaching search,” Murphy said in a statement. “We are confident that she will achieve great success at Columbia by winning Ivy League Championships.”

The Lions finished 8-6-3 overall last season, but struggled in Ivy play, posting a 1-4-2 record to finish sixth in the Ancient Eight. Historically, Columbia has performed far better in nonconference games, a trend that Bartholomew will need to reverse. The Light Blue won four or more Ivy games only twice under McCarthy—in 2008 and in 2006, when the Lions took home the program’s only Ivy title.